When I started as a perma here a few months ago I told a friend about it, and his first response was, “I bet that pays you well.”  This is someone I like and respect a lot, and at the time I took it as light-hearted sarcasm and laughed along with him.  But later I thought, was that disrespectful?  Should I have felt insulted?  I am not upset with this person, but in retrospect his quip has made me think about work.  Both my intuition and Malcolm Gladwell have told me that happiness is connected to having meaningful work.  From his book Outliers:

“Three things: autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between 9 and 5. It is whether our work fulfills us. … Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful.”

For me blogging does all three: it’s autonomous (I can write whenever I find time, about pretty much anything that interests me), there is complexity inherent to thinking and writing, and an effort to write something meaningful often comes with a reward of having a discussion in the comments.  So yes, blogging pays me well.  Other meaningful work I have is my mothering and service to others.  Right now my paid employment is not very meaningful – I feel I’ve learned all I can in my current position and would like to find a new one with new challenges.  So it turns out my work where the reward is money is my least meaningful work.

How does the meaningfulness of your work correlate with money?  What is your most meaningful work?

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Before Christmas I read an article about how since fathers are doing more of the child care and more of the purchasing for their families, toy makers are responding by producing toys for girls that also appeal to men.  Enter construction worker Barbie and pink Legos.

This may be the first generation of girls to get a chance (on average) to play a lot with construction-type toys.  From the article:

“Research shows that playing with blocks, puzzles and construction toys helps children with spatial development, said Dr. Susan C. Levine, chairwoman of the psychology department at the University of Chicago and co-principal investigator at the National Science Foundation’s Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center. Even controlling for other skills such as verbal and numerical skills, she said, children with better spatial thinking are more likely to eventually go into mathematics, engineering, science and technology.

She said that a set aimed at girls could be beneficial, if only because it might increase girls’ likelihood of participating in construction activities.

Dr. O’Brien, the consultant on the new Barbie set, said adults had traditionally been “the limiting factor” in why girls have not played with those toys as often.”

I thought it was fascinating (and obvious, in hindsight) that adults have been the reason girls haven’t received toys that develop spatial skills, and as I recall in my childhood, nary a Lego entered our home until I was about 10 or 11 and my little brothers were old enough to play with them.  At that point, I certainly wasn’t interested in playing with construction toys.

This Christmas, my husband and I bought our 5-year old son a Lego set (although his favorite gift was a set of WWII airplanes from his cousin), and our 2 year-old daughter received pretend-play kitchen toys (since that’s what she gravitates toward in her Nursery class) and some puzzles.  I want both my kids to fully develop their minds in all kinds of ways, but it’s interesting to me that my husband is the one that’s the most vigilant about making sure our daughter doesn’t get too many “all-girl” toys.  And, he’s the one to really shop the sales.  The toy makers are noticing!

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The American Girl catalog showed up in the mailbox a few weeks ago, timed precisely to get to my daughters just as I’m too exhausted thinking about Christmas to sort the mail as carefully as I’d like. That was an afternoon of “Look, she has a pet bunny and it has its own carrots!” and “Matching PJs. Cool.”

Honestly, I’m quite fond of the American Girl dolls. Women’s historical fiction! Learning about dress in different time periods! Promoting girl initiative! Keeping children young for as long as possible! Confession: I saw the catalog, and I put it where they’d be sure to see it. We weren’t ready to jump into the AG world a few years ago, but now that my daughters are 7 and so-close-to-6-she-can-taste-it, bring it, dollfriends.

So I asked them, thinking I was being sneaky, “If you could save up your money, which doll would you buy?” And that’s where it all started.

My plan, you see, was to have Santa bring them the dolls for Christmas. Which he’s going to do, by the way, and with a little luck and some help from a friend we might even find a pair of raspberry-framed glasses for Beth’s doll to wear, because Beth wears raspberry-framed glasses and the website says they’re back-ordered until December 31st. But he’s also going to leave the girls a note saying that they need to pay for the dolls’ extras — matching PJs, bunnies, book series — with their own money.  The girls’ plan is a little more complex, but because it’s their idea I’m going with it, and I’m really excited to see what happens.

It turns out they both thought that saving money to buy their own dolls was a great idea. A really great idea. So much so that they went upstairs to get their banks (piggy for Beth, froggy for Sarah) and counted out all of their money on the kitchen table. Beth has almost $40; Sarah has around $25. And then we figured out how much money each girl would need to earn in order to buy her doll. And they realized that it was a pretty serious sum of money, but they were pretty sure they could do it.

I suggested that daddy and I could pay them for doing extra chores. Sarah suggested a lemonade stand. Beth pointed out that no one is going to want to buy lemonade until summer, and countered with a hot chocolate stand. And then the lightbulb went on: “Mommy, can we make hot chocolate mix and sell it on Etsy?” (Background note here: their dad is an accounting professor and I have an Etsy shop, so this isn’t quite the kind of cognitive leap it might appear to be. My mom was a teacher, and my sister and I played school a lot.) So I said, sure, why not?

Sarah drew up a prototype, based on some hot chocolate mix they’d received as a birthday party favor last year (and I do mean drew: on scratch paper with a dull pencil, and with a few misspellings — oh, here, I’ll just take a picture of it for you all):

 

Beth took over from there. We had to have the right kind of bags, for starters. So she sat next to me and told me what to Google on my laptop. We searched until we found a quantity less than 1,000 and with reasonable shipping. At this point I started a spreadsheet — I wanted to show her that 100 bags for $15.60 comes out to almost 16 cents per bag. “That’s cheap,” she said. “How much does the rest of it cost?” So she picked up Sarah’s drawing and told me what else to put in the spreadsheet. And asked her dad what goes in hot chocolate mix. And drew up a shopping list of everything we’d need, from cocoa and powdered sugar to cornstarch and twist ties. And labels — they had to have labels.

Beth was on a roll at this point. I won’t bore you with the details, but we searched fonts and clip art for about an hour, and she has pretty strong opinions about what she likes, and I’d do something on the computer and she’d say, “Mom, can you curve it a little bit more?” and “Can the mug be pink instead of blue?” and “I want the letters to look like they were made by somebody my age,” and now we have a label. Last night we made a test batch of cocoa mix, packaged the first two cones, and then the girls went to bed and left me to clean up the sugary mess on the kitchen table. And I am totally okay with this. The two little odd packages on the kitchen table aren’t fit to be photographed (apparently we’re going to need some practice), but I’m ridiculously proud of my kids. They even talked about the fact that taking tastes would cut into their profits.

And I’m reminded of a great conversation I had with sister blogger Suzette the first time I met her, about how the things we tell our sons and daughters in Mormon culture are different: boys grow up expecting that they’ll have to support a family, and tend to choose college majors that will prepare them to do so; girls grow up hearing “Get all the education you can” with undertones of “but it can be in something not-very-marketable because sure, you’ll have a job, but you aren’t likely to have a career.” It’s what the two of us had heard, anyway, and we’d both ended up going to graduate school not because it was part of our master life plan but because we realized we needed that extra leg up to compete with all the guys who’d written it into their master plans about the same time they returned from missions.

I want all three of my kids (even Drew, who is just starting to speak in sentences) to grow up with solid economic tools: a good sense for money and its worth, a healthy skepticism toward marketing, an understanding of the real costs of things (including the external costs, and I bring them up often), an inclination to work and to care about quality, and a sense of what it is to take on a project and be successful at it. They’re going to have to know how to shop for things — not just how to buy them, but to really comparison shop. They’ll need to interview for jobs that might not exist yet. They’re pretty good at making chocolate chip cookies on their own (well, after I wrote up the recipe in words they could understand), but this is another thing entirely, to take a product from idea through production and (with any luck, and some kind grandparents) make money on it. I know I’ll end up pretty involved (and sick of scrubbing the kitchen table), but this is their project, their apprenticeship.

The healthy sense of self and ability to make a plan and take action on it, the confidence that if they start on a project and stick to it they’ll succeed — these are the things I want them to learn. Along the way there are going to be a bunch of specific lessons in economics, accounting, marketing, project management, product design, not giving up when you’re bored, and the mind-boggling idea that nickels are bigger than dimes but are actually worth less.

What are the life lessons you want your children to learn? What have been some of the opportunities that allowed your children (or yourself!) to learn them?

 

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Last weekend my daughters and I went on a pilgrimage. I know Jews feel compelled to make the “Aliyah” to Israel, and for Muslims the “haj” is to Mecca. As a Mormon woman, I feel like I should similarly be drawn to Palmyra, one of our LDS Holy Lands.  Yet I’ve never felt the pull. Then I found out that the son of some dear friends was getting married there and having a reception in Rochester. I love these people.  From Boston where we live, that’s less than a 7 hour drive. Next thing I knew we were cruising down the 90, blasting the mix-tape of hymns we call “Spirit-Chill Tunes,” and hieing to Kolob at 80 mph.

We arrived in Palmyra on Sunday afternoon. My 6 year-old was restless so I skipped the tour and instead headed straight into the Sacred Grove.  I hoped that strains of “Oh How Lovely Was the Morning” would be echoing in my kids’ heads as we made our way down the path. We sat on a bench and I tried to steer the conversation to something spiritual but my First Vision talk just got the six year-old locked on to which spot was the spot and where were the gold plates and could she hold them if she did so gently (thank you Martin Harris Jr.). The middle child (who suffers from JBS–Jan Brady Syndrome) became upset because all I do is pay attention to the little one. Sigh. Then a mosquito bit her. So much for serenity.

We took the southern exit and meandered towards the barn. And in this short journey some nice little moments took place. My oldest hopped over a fence and wandered the fields, clearly enchanted by the place. The youngest found a water pump that she said she could just tell Joseph had used and wasn’t that as good as seeing the plates (never mind that it couldn’t be more than 40 years old)? The middle spotted the most amazing dragonflies by a creek. They were bright turquoise and iridescent and as we watched them, the birds in the apple trees serenaded us. “Music ringing through the grove” indeed.

As for me, I enjoyed it all. The Smith farm, Cumorah, the Grandin Press. But it wasn’t until we were sitting in a little shop eating sandwiches that I was able to look at my lovely girls and truly feel nearer to God. I took a giant sip of my Diet Coke and said out loud to whomever might be listening, “All is well. All is well.”

Where are your sacred places? If you’ve been to Palmyra, Nauvoo, Jerusalem, did they live up to your expectations? And most importantly, what songs would you put on your spiritual mix tape?

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One of my favorite things about the Church is that it provides lots of opportunities to serve. Even when I have struggled with certain aspects of my religion and found Sundays uninspiring, I recognize that getting out of myself and doing for others makes me a better, happier person. And the LDS faith consistently offers me chances to serve and be served. So now that my 15 year-old son is attempting to boycott Sunday attendance on the grounds that he doesn’t “buy into it,” I am struggling to get him to understand that being Mormon is so much more than belief. In fact, for lots of us, belief is beside the point.

Last night we had a talk and I said that if he was going to refuse to go to Church on Sundays, he needed to find someplace he could go and serve instead, like a soup kitchen or a nursing home. This irritated and perplexed him.  “You just think I don’t want to go because I’m lazy.” Of course I think he’s lazy–he groans when I ask him to empty the dishwasher. When I told him that in our family, we serve each other and the community, and he couldn’t do that staying home watching Myth Busters, he countered that the three hours spent in Church are not service hours.

While that may be technically true, I disagreed. The connections I make on Sunday, the people I interact with, the stories I hear shared, and just observing my fellow saints, all this creates and/or enhances my willingness to reach out to others. His reply totally floored me. “Yeah, but it’s not like you spend three hours a week outside of church serving people.” Oh the cluelessness of a know-it-all teenager. I contemplated telling him about all the time and resources I have already spent this week–and it’s only Tuesday. But much of what I do would not qualify in his mind as “service.” For example today a few of us who work in YW busted our butts to fix the prom dress of one of our girls. My son would find it ridiculous to spend so much time and effort finding a way to add sleeves to a strapless dress so that it would cover a bit more flesh without ending up looking “too Mormon.” I did not inherit the modesty gene and thought the dress was fine. But to this YW, it mattered a lot. And even though I swear sometimes God rolls his eyes at me when I pray for all sorts of silly things, I know he listens and blesses me just the same.  So too I am trying to value the things that matter to the people around me. (And the dress looks gorgeous!)

And this is a big part of why I want my son at Church. I want him to notice who is feeling excluded. I want him to take the time to talk to the chatty, lonely sister who passes out programs. I want him to see that his YM leader has prepared the lesson specifically with him in mind, that he is loved by this community that has served him his whole life. And that they need him too. I can accept that he doesn’t believe. But you don’t have to believe in Christ to be Christ-like. So whether in an LDS chapel or a secular venue, I will teach my kids that charity is not optional.

 

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This last Mother’s Day was new to me. In the past few months, we unexpectedly found ourselves in the lucky position of increasing the numbers in our household, with the end goal/hope/prayer to permanently adopt. It has been a wonderful adventure and my husband and I are absolutely thrilled. Still… I faced Mother’s Day with trepidation. The first time I was wished a Happy Mother’s Day outside of the foisted “future mother” carnation at church, I was a young single adult. It was in a simple, yet beautiful card from a gay friend. He was also Mormon, and a close enough to know that I could never carry a pregnancy. As he recognised that we both had impossible mountains to climb if we were to gain the families we desired, he wished me a Happy Mother’s Day in a beautiful card with a hand-written addition, to the “Mother in embryo”.

Since then, other men, usually men I dated or close friends, including my husband, wished me Happy Mother’s Days. Most often, children I know—nieces, nephews, Sunday school children who all know I do not have the worldly status of “mother” have always wished me a Happy Mother’s Day. Dear, beautiful, precious close female friends also have wished me a Happy Mother’s Day. I’ve loved this and always felt that was… well… normal. So, when we first married, my husband and I made the choice to celebrate our pre-eternal selves. With this, we have always given each other gifts and celebrated each other for Father’s and Mother’s Days.

This always seemed quite normal to me, until one May when I went Visiting Teaching.

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